SoundHound iOS app adds lyrics tracking capabilities

There are a few apps in the iTunes App Store designed to help people figure out the names of songs when they’re hearing them. After a big update today, SoundHound may now be the most powerful.

Already, SoundHound used the microphones on iOS devices to pick up songs as its users are hearing them and help identify them. The app bounces the information out to the Internet, figures out what you’re listening to, and lets you know what the song is and who plays it, among other information. You can also search for information about songs and bands just by speaking search terms to the app. Apparently, it works pretty well, considering that, according to its developers, SoundHound is a historically top-selling iPad app.

With the update to version 4.0 of SoundHound’s various apps comes LiveLyrics, a feature that brings up lyric information for anything you search for using the app. It’s not exactly a new feature – multiple other song search apps also bring up lyric information – but what sets SoundHound apart is the sheer volume of lyrics it has access to.

A million songs by year-end

According to SoundHound Inc., the app carries 500,000 songs worth of lyrics at launch today. The service actually does more than just provide the words to the song, it actually drops the lyrics in time with the music when you use it along with your device’s iPod functions, turning the feature into a sort of sing-along tool. You can also scroll along the lyrics to read all of them, double-tap to skip to a specific portion of a song, or flip back to the part that’s currently playing along with the app.

Half a million tracks is a lot of lyrics for the app to handle, but SoundHound pledges to bring that number up to a million over the course of the next six months. The update is also headed to the Android version of the app within the year as well.

Best of all, the SoundHound update is available right now – no waiting. Snag it and turn your playlists into sing-alongs today.